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This article was first published in the December 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman, at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, studies the way our brains perceive our environment and construct individual realities. He explores time perception, synaesthesia and the neural mechanics behind the sensory experience -- all topics in his book, The Brain (published in November alongside a US PBS TV series). Eagleman attempts to explain how the brain takes shape and how we could retrofit it to enhance our sensory appreciation.

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One such retrofit is the Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer (VEST). A tank top packed with microcontrollers and vibrating elements being developed in Eagleman's lab, the VEST aims to give a form of hearing to those who are hearing-impaired. It's driven by the principle of sensory substitution, a major area of Eagleman's research that looks at how technology could tap different sensory pathways to allow someone, in effect, to regain a lost sense.

Worn on the torso, the garment converts sounds into vibrations that play on the wearer's skin, relying on the brain's ability to extract information from a multitude of sensory signals, regardless of origin. The brain learns to interpret individual VEST vibrations as particular sounds, allowing people without hearing to navigate complex soundscapes.

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WIRED speaks to Eagleman about his invention, his book and how the brain's structure makes it possible to enhance our sensory experience of the world.

WIRED: In The Brain<sup>1</sup> you say that from birth, human brains can "wire on the fly". What does this mean?

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David Eagleman: Yes, the remarkable thing about the human brain is that it is extremely plastic, meaning it adjusts its own circuitry to match the tasks at hand; it comes to reflect the environment that it drops into.

Every time you learn a new fact, for instance when you learn that my name is David, there is a physical change in your brain. It's especially true when we're young and we learn about the culture that we're in, and we absorb the language that happens to surround us. But throughout our lives this continues.

Your book describes a famous brain -- Einstein's -- that "rewired", revealing the brain's plasticity in adulthood.

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When Einstein donated his brain to science [after his death] everybody thought, "Now we're going to see what a genius brain looks like." But the main thing they found just reflected that he played violin: there's an area on the motor cortex that corresponds to finger movements on the left hand, and a violinist uses their left hand for very detailed, fast motions.

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In some of your work you exploit this characteristic to give humans an enhanced perception of the world. What drives this idea?

I'm working on the ways we can expand the sensory signals that we take in<sup>2</sup>, so that we're not just stuck with eyes and ears, noses and fingertips that only pick up a very narrow slice of signals out there. There's no reason why we can't expand that. This is related to brain plasticity: the way I view the brain is as a general-purpose-computational device, and it doesn't care what kind of sensors you plug into it, it just figures out how to use them.

You're developing the wearable VEST and with it you're exploiting the sense of touch. Why touch?

We're taking advantage of skin, this incredible computational material, and using it to pass on data. We pick up sounds and do all the computation to break it into 40 streams of information. The VEST has vibratory motors all over it and we convert the data into patterns of vibration, which we tap as a dynamic moving pattern on to the torso.

How does the brain learn to interpret these strange vibrations as sounds?

Each motor represents some frequency band: low, high and everything in between. If I'm talking to you, my voice is represented by a sweeping pattern of touch across your skin. By establishing correlations with the outside world -- as in, every time I hit this piano key I feel this pattern, or every time someone says my name it feels like that -- the brain eventually figures out how to translate the patterns into an understanding of the auditory world.

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Whether that feels exactly the same as hearing is unknown, but it amounts to the same thing. Just think of the way a blind person passes fingers over Braille: the experience may not be exactly like seeing words, but the way the meaning flows off the page is equivalent. It sounds like it would be a real challenge, but that's what brains are really good at doing: unlocking patterns.